EG is the celebration of the American entertainment industry. Since 1984, Richard Saul Wurman has created extraordinary gatherings about learning and understanding. EG is a rich extension of these ideas - a conference that explores the attitude of understanding in music, film, television, radio, technology, advertising, gaming, interactivity and the web- The Entertainment Gathering

Christine Eckstrom

Chris Eckstrom is a writer, editor, and videographer whose
work celebrates the wonder of the natural world and seeks to explore how
people and wildlife can coexist. Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she
grew up in Washington, D.C., South Carolina, and New England.

A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, she is the author of Forgotten Edens
(National Geographic Books), and is a contributing author of more than a
dozen books published by National Geographic, where she worked as a
staff writer for 15 years. Assignments have taken her to wild places on
all seven continents to cover subjects ranging from wildlife in Zambia
to a profile of Brazil’s Pantanal.

For the past two decades she has worked with her
husband and partner, Frans Lanting, on field assignments from the Amazon
to Mongolia. Her stories have appeared in National Geographic, Audubon, International Wildlife, National Geographic Traveler, and in other international publications. Her National Geographic Traveler story, “The Last Real Africa,” earned her a Lowell Thomas Award for Best Magazine Article on Foreign Travel.

Eckstrom collaborated with Lanting to produce Life: A Journey Through Time
(Taschen), a lyrical interpretation of the history of life on Earth
from the Big Bang to the present. They worked together to realize The
LIFE Project as a traveling exhibition, an interactive website (www.LifeThroughTime.com), and a multimedia orchestral performance featuring the imagery of Lanting and the music of composer Philip Glass. LIFE
as a multimedia production premiered at the Cabrillo Festival of
Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California, in 2006, and is currently
touring North America and Europe. Eckstrom and Lanting also worked
together to produce ORIGINS, a new multimedia production based on LIFE. Specially commissioned by CERN, the European Council on Nuclear Research, ORIGINS was performed at the ceremony to inaugurate the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, in October 2008.

Eckstrom has teamed up with Lanting to produce a number of acclaimed natural history and photography books, including Jungles (Taschen), Penguin (Taschen), Eye to Eye (Taschen) and Okavango: Africa's Last Eden
(Chronicle Books). After traveling by icebreaker to visit emperor
penguin colonies along the coast of east Antarctica, she wrote “Time on
Ice,” a story that appeared in a collection of essays entitled Celebration of the Seas.

As a videographer, Eckstrom documents the fieldwork she
produces with Lanting. She has filmed pieces for the National
Geographic Channel and NGM.com on cloud goats in India, elephants of the
Western Ghats, Hawaii's volcanoes, wildlife in Zambia, albatrosses in
the Southern Ocean, and chimpanzees in West Africa. Her coverage of
chimpanzees in West Africa was also featured in the NOVA-National
Geographic television special "Ape Genius," which received a Peabody
Award.

Chris Eckstrom lives in Santa Cruz, California, with
her husband and partner, Frans Lanting, in a coastal meadow they share
with bobcats, coyotes, and elusive mountain lions.

Frans Lanting

The world's pre-eminent wildlife photographer, Frans was born in Rotterdam, emigrated to the U.S., found his bride Chris Eckstrom — and made the world's wildest and farthest places into his studio, with the most charismatic creatures as his models. A Knight in the Royal Order of the Golden Ark, his images are iconic, lyrical, unforgettable, breathtaking.